Müther Turm

Ulrich Müther built 74 concrete hypershell structures across the GDR, but his method was deemed too labor-intensive for West Germany’s economy, where materials were cheap and workers expensive. After reunification, many of his buildings were demolished, and by 1999 his own construction firm had gone bankrupt, undone by an economic logic that no longer valued what it had once relied on. The rescue tower he designed in Binz survived, trading lifeguards scanning for swimmers in distress for couples scanning each other’s eyes during wedding vows. Since 2006, the registry office has operated from inside the swooping concrete shells, where beach sand covers the floor and floor-to-ceiling windows frame the Baltic Sea.

The tower nearly didn’t make it either. By the time it stopped watching the beach in 2004, its thin concrete shells needed real intervention, and in 2017 the Wüstenrot Stiftung took it on as a preservation project, working out how to insulate curved surfaces never meant to be climate-controlled. What was once dismissed as communist infrastructure is now treated as something closer to sculpture, an unlikely reputation upgrade for a building type the West wrote off decades ago. In 2024, Rügen marked what would have been Müther’s 90th birthday with a week dedicated to his work, a small, overdue nod to an engineer who spent a career proving that austerity, handled well, could still produce something worth saving.